teriyaki sauce for using on top of frozen veggies

Ingredients:

• Kikoman Teriyaki Marinade & Sauce
  • Its flavor is great, but it's very concentrated, and is a very thin liquid. 1) Its flavor needs to be diluted a bit, and 2) from a viscosity perspective, it needs some kind of sauce thickener so it can cling to vegetables.
• cold butter
• tapioca starch slurry (at a 5:1 ratio by weight)
• water

Instructions:

1. Mix teriyaki sauce and water, and heat to near-simmering. (the 'steam point')
2. Add cold butter and whisk constantly until emulsified.
3. Add tapioca starch slurry, bit by bit, until the desired thickness is reached. Each time after adding some starch, stir and wait 2 minutes to allow time for the starch to activate.
4. Keep warm until serving, to prevent the emulsification from breaking.

The last time I made this, I tried these quantities:

• teriyaki sauce — 1 tbsp / 0.5 oz / 15 mL
• water — 3 tbsp / 1.5 oz / 50 mL
• butter — 1 tbsp
• tapioca starch slurry — to desired thickness

Journal notes:

• Last time, T said it was way too strong and needed to be diluted a lot more. This time it's a lot closer to what they prefer.
• It's still very salt-forward, at the very least. It probably needs to be diluted more. Try increasing the water to 5 tbsp / 2.5 oz / 75 mL.
• I could have used more tapioca starch, next time go for closer to a ketchup consistency. Note that when the sauce hits the hot veggies, it usually thins out a little bit, relative to how thick it is after it's been cooling for a few minutes.
• If I were cooking for both T and I, I would probably want to scale the amount to 1.5x. For me by myself, 1x scaling is fine.